Acceptance arrived quickly despite the soul-crushing blow dealt to my spirit today. I refer, of course, to the weekend beta code. Apparently the fine print was not read closely by yours truly, for upon the advent of the Auspicious Announcement, it turned out my NCSOFT login no longer allowed me to enter my WildStar account.

What fresh hell is this? WITCHCRAFT, I tell you!

But fear not, dear reader, for I have consolation in spades. Well, maybe not spades, but in quantity enough to spare a bit for all. For there is yet more from LAST weekend I have not shared, and I shall do now here and now! Avaunt, ye melancholic humours!

Sorry. Lost myself a bit there. Back to it.

Tradeskills —

There’s tons of goodvideo on W* tradeskills available. I horsed around with Technologist/Relic Hunter and could make some excellent medishots and buffs right away. Go Juice is awesome, by the way. Cheap to make, great for shortening travel time or escaping fights, and stacks vendor for upward of a gold, which will be very helpful come level 14 when you want to afford your house. Resources were extremely plentiful at least at the lower levels (and they should be: low-level unlocks should never have prohibitive usability barriers) and the crafting station became a go-to stop every time I returned to town. The variance system was a blast, although a bit painful to the checkbook.

(For those that don’t know, recipes frequently have variations that are created by paying game-cash to slot in other ingredients. Your one-hit medishot might be able to do its healing over time, or do a series of weaker heals and then one big blast at the end, for instance. It’s gonna cost ya, tho.)

An artificial economy needs sinks to balance currency value, however, and this could be a very effective method.

Lag —

I’ll admit my system isn’t cutting edge. Honestly, I’ve no idea what the average PC gamer’s rig looks like these days, but I’m probably on the low end if anything. I was not expecting flawless framerate with cranked graphics. Besides, it’s beta, for fuck’s sake. Things are going to be glitchy and psycho at times.

But good-god-almighty; people could not accept it. Every time I logged in I bailed out of the Advice channel ASAP just to ditch the tirades. Now, if you’ve got a crazy-ass system that usually eats benchmark software packages for lunch and spits out their skeletonized code fragments, sub-standard performance may not be a common experience for you. Understand one thing, however:

It does not mean a game is crap.

Yes, there were areas that I could barely operate in because my Mordesh was taking a single step every five seconds and then suddenly outrunning his own bullets, or firing assaults into phantom monsters that were not where they appeared to be. And I will ragequit for a good half-hour if I have to try and ride a waterspout up a cliff under severe lag problems again.

But I was still having fun. So suck it, lag — you can’t ruin MY day. Besides, server announcements proved that Carbine was well aware of the state of play and actively working to combat the problems. What more do you Advice channel douchenozzles want?

((Rant disclaimer — the majority of players seemed to be lovely folks who were overjoyed at seeing Nexus firsthand. My ire is directed only at the vocal turdmuffins who monopolized much of the chatbox space.))

Environment —

Love love love the interactive environment. Jumpy-platform ‘shrooms are beautiful things. And the achievement system. Wait, you get LOOT for achievements? Take my non-existent money! Hang on, if I use my scanbot to examine this totem I get a temporary flight form? Ye gods! And just across the river…

It’s fresh. After several years of MMOs that seem to rehash the same mechanics, WildStar is the only one that seems to be willing to raise the bar. The game doesn’t treat you like a novice. The designers know they have a number of new systems and mechanics, and the game seems aware that much of the sequences of combat and exploration will be new to the players. They’ve put the effort into teaching new players how to work the systems and the environment, and while I was by no means an expert, I felt reasonably proficient fairly quickly.

If you’ve read anything about WildStar, you probably know about the highly mobile combat and the telegraph system. As I am more used to the stand-and-fire elements of World of Warcraft combat, I felt like the stereotypical redcoat faced with Native American hit-and-run warfare. ((Note: I am well aware of the historical inaccuracy of this metaphor.))

It’s at this point that one becomes fast friends with the Dash button.

Eventually you find your rhythm and begin to dodge most of the enemy telegraphs, and despite fights being a bit on the longer side, you have more health at the end of combat. Adds make life exponentially more complicated, but honestly, the frenetic pace is very enjoyable.

I’m a huge fan of the housing system as well — it unlocks at level 14, so I only got to play around with it briefly. Which brings me to my very first photo-journal!

Well, lasses and lads, it’s been almost a full year since my little game-blogging experiment went on hiatus. Life is a many-splendored thing (or are those the wrong lyrics?) and I’ve got my writing chops back. Besides, I just got in on the mother-effing WildStar beta, near as I can tell. So that’s hellaciously awesome.

Sad bit is, I don’t think I can play until after work tomorrow, assuming my semi-outdated system can even run the game. Fingers crossed.

So I’m going to tip my hand for you folks a bit and let you in on one of my favorite parts of game prep: Character Planning! Hopefully the names I want are available.

My first character is to be Christoph Croake, a Mordesh Spellslinger of dubious pedigree. I love the futuristic Victorian elements that Carbine’s applied to these Grismaran natives, and the tropes of Guns Akimbo and Omnidisciplinary Scientist blend together nicely. Since his planet was decimated by alchemy gone awry, a potentially-limiting class-based society has gone the way of the dodo (or whatever harmless alien bird species have been extinct-ified in a similar fashion), giving Christoph a fair option at making himself more than a working stiff. That’s a bit of a pun, for those who know their Mordesh lore.

I will confess – I’ve never been to a convention. Or an expo. Or any sort of geek/entertainment/video game Mecca event thing. It’s all secondhand to me, mostly because I’ve never been able to make time for anything more involved than watching a YouTube video of Nathan Fillion being awesome. Be that as it may, I’m not totally broken up about it, because other people can judge me all they want to and I don’t care.

But the people that make the videos and put them on YouTube so that I can enjoy them later are demigods to me. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to share things like WildStar Dev Panels with YOU.

Random highlights for me:

The Halon Ring is the first zone we see, and there seems to be a nice mixup of epic adventure elements with goofy random aspects. WildStar loves variety. They don’t want it to be a grind and they don’t want the gameplay to get stagnant.

Paths get benefits from questing together in WildStar. Explorers let the rest of the group get easier access to zone areas, while Scientists might unlock features of the ecology to give allies a strategic advantage.

Protostar is once again confirmed as a largely unethical, opportunistic, blithely greedy megacorps. Fun!

Housing development is not only decorative, but as functional as possible. I fully intend to have a ridiculously, excessively fortified home for at least one of my WildStar characters. Weapons platforms everywhere. Still hoping it’s nothing like Farmville, though.

The placement/scaling tool looks GREAT. Very intuitive for positioning/orientation/sizing, and giving full control on the housing interior arrangement.

Crafters will be able to make something called ‘fabrication kits’ which are apparently self-contained installations for your housing plot exterior. They can also accelerate the construction of certain features.

Taxi stations (WildStar’s answer to WoW’s Flight Paths, I assume.) can be built at your house.

Most of the stuff you get doesn’t come from vendors – either you earn it yourself or you can get it from a crafter. To me, this reinforces the point that the player is the point of the game, and it won’t be a farming/turn-in focused experience.

Doing random crap and poking around at the interactivity unlocks new things that may not be apparent on first scan.

Exploding sheep.

The Esper has this spinning sawblade of death thing, but it looks to be a static placement on a delay, which makes me giddy with tactical anticipation. Check around 34:44.

That’s my brief cross-section of the content. What about you – did you spy anything I didn’t?

I confess, I’ve never played an MMO featuring player housing. I hear the stories of Ultima Online and the crazy player-created housing market and all that it entailed. Once again, however, WildStar has thrown down the gauntlet for implementing layered mechanics and content, demonstrating that the conceptualization of player housing holds more than just a hilarious promo video.

Observe:

So not only do we have customizable personal space, gameplay mechanic benefits, and social platforming aids, but we have dynamic resource plots, crafting aids, questing hubs, portals, and who knows what else. I can easily see this taking the place of a banking system for those players with homes. If Carbine wants an inter-player economy, you could easily have a storefront option.

As long as this aspect doesn’t reflect Farmville too much, I think I’ll be happy.

Throughout the exposé, I was once again struck by the layering aspect of WildStar. This really looks like a game that wants everything to affect everything, and for players to constantly be exposed to different parts of the game without forcing them to pursue all of them. It stands to reason that someone who finds a housing decoration from killing a random critter is going to be more likely to try out the whole homeowner thing — and if they can put a resource node on their property, then why not see what this whole “crafting” thing is all about? And, oh wait, I can have friends over? Well, why not make some more friends and show this place off to them?